In May, 1977, the Jacobson farmstead seven miles southeast
of Decorah, Iowa, was donated by Charlotte, Constance, and
Eugene Jacobson of Northfield, Minnesota, and Henning Jacobson
of Bayonet Point, Florida, to Vesterheim, the Norwegian-American
Museum, as a coherent material record of a Norwegian immigrant
family from shortly after its arrival in the mid-nineteenth
century to the present. The physical evidence of the farmstead
itself as well as the written and pictorial documents remaining
on it or with the family reveals an interplay of conflicting
forces ó the traditional versus the new, the agrarian versus
the urban, the mundane versus the spiritual and intellectualó
typical of much in Norwegian immigrant culture. Though no
conclusions will be drawn regarding the entire immigrant group,
the farmstead and its family are presented here as a case
study in the dynamics of Norwegian immigrant life.

The farmstead is completely the work of the Jacobson family.
It was chosen as the dwelling site on a plot of land claimed
by Jacob and Gro (Eggerud) Abrahamson and their three children,
who came as one of the first sixteen Norwegian immigrant families
to the Decorah area in 1850. {1} It remained in the possession
of Jacobís descendants, who followed Norwegian custom by taking
his first name to become Jacobson, until transferred to Vesterheim
129 years later. It had then already been twenty-five years
since intellectual and urban pursuits had claimed all the
living descendants in the line through which the farm had
passed, but familial piety and an awareness of the farmís
historic significance had prevented the family from selling
it. Having the farmstead go to the Museum as an academically
maintained example of agrarian immigrant life was a fitting
solution to a conflict that had marked the farmís entire history.

Jacob and Gro Abrahamson shortly after
their arrival in America in 1848.

Presumably "Stenbole" as
it appeared in 1898, fifty years after Jacob and Gro
left.
The log house with a partition near one end facing a
barn with a large central doorway corresponds to the
early arrangement at the farmstead in Iowa.

The specific circumstances which led Jacob and Gro to leave
their cotterís farm in Vestfjorddalen, Tinn, Telemark, in
1848 are not known, but the name of their farm, Stenbøle
(stony place), gives a clue, as does a photograph of the farm
from 1898. {2} There was need for more and better land. A
letter written home by Jacob while settled temporarily in
Muskego, Wisconsin, just after arriving in America indicates
that greater opportunities in general also contributed to
the lure of the New World. After dwelling at length on the
availability of work, the high wages, and the low cost of
living in America, Jacob writes, "I am sure I will live
better in America without a farm than I would in Norway with
one of the largest farms." {3} The possibility of making
a living in America without working the land returns like
a leitmotiv in the Jacobson story.

In spite of his praise of opportunity in America, Jacobís
own aims remained ultimately agrarian, and his conception
of farming remained fundamentally Norwegian. Moving with the
vanguard of Norwegian families who left southeast Wisconsin
to cross the Mississippi and claim land in the newly opened
territory in northeast Iowa, Jacob spent the rest of his life
on the farm he obtained there.

The basic elements of the Jacobson farmstead as it stands
today were established by Jacob before his death in 1879.
The farm was then 173 acres, the size it would remain. The
log house, which is the core of the existing dwelling, follows
essentially the traditional Norwegian three-room house plan.
A close look at illustration no. 2 indicates that this is
what the family was used to in Norway. Having doors in both
the front and the back is unusual, but the placement of both
has prototypes in the rural dwellings of Telemark. One door
goes directly into the large room, as in the so-called Akershus
plan, and the other (here on the back) goes into one of the
two small gable-end rooms, as was typical in older three-room
houses. {4} The half story above the ground level does not
have a long tradition in rural Norway, but it was far from
unknown there when Jacob Abrahamson and his family left in
the middle of the nineteenth century. {5} The fact that the
wall dividing the gable-end rooms from the main room is only
in the upper story and not in the lower is also an unusual
feature that may have some incidental rather than traditional
explanation. {6} The logs are not tightly fitted as in Norway,
but this feature was, for reasons not completely understood,
also abandoned immediately by most other immigrant builders.
{7}

The placement of the house higher than the barn on a slope
leading down to a stream is also in line with Norwegian tradition,
although it has a logic so obvious that tradition need not
have entered in. Loosely enclosing the space between the house
and the barn by placing storage buildings at both ends is
more specifically traditional, as is the placement of the
blacksmith shop (now gone but clearly documented) well outside
this enclosure. {8} Some of the actual buildings in this secondary
group may date from slightly after Jacobís death, but the
placement of the earlier ones serving their function would
most likely have been the same.

The Jacobson farmstead as viewed from the
northeast in 1913.
It had arrived at this state in 1908 and no new construction
occurred afterward.

The portion of the barn remaining from Jacobís period deviates
from Norwegian tradition in being of stone, but its placement
along a steep embankment with the wagon entrance to the hayloft
in the middle of the long wall on the upper side has numerous
prototypes in rural Norway. Placing the cow barn below the
hay loft, on the other hand, is a more American feature. The
shift from log to stone was common in large buildings around
Decorah because long straight timber was scarce and sandstone
with cleavages appropriate for cutting building blocks was
readily available. Expertise for its use must also have existed
in the community because stone barns from the 1850s and 1860s
are found on many surrounding farms.

Assessor records reveal that the livestock on the farm during
Jacobís period also corresponded approximately to that on
a small Norwegian farm: about seven head of cattle and two
or three horses, sheep, and pigs. These would have provided
little more than the needs of the household. Most cash had
to be obtained by work in the lumbering industry or other
day labor, as was also true in the inner valleys of Norway
at the time. {9} Because of the greater tillable acreage,
there could have been a greater surplus of grain and potatoes
for sale than in Norway.

Jacob and Gro had little assistance on the farm. Their one
daughter, Helga, if her obituary is correct, married in 1858
and apparently left the farm, moving eventually to Rock county,
in extreme southwestern Minnesota. {10} Niels (1844ó1925),
the younger of the two sons, left home two years later at
age sixteen to become one of the first pupils at Augustana
College in Chicago. From there he enlisted in the 6th Iowa
Cavalry for service against the Indians. Niels, too, eventually
settled on a farm in Rock county, Minnesota, but devoted much
of his time to community endeavors. In 1903ó1904 he served
as a member of the Minnesota State Legislature. His early
intellectual pursuits apparently freed him from the most mundane
aspects of agrarian life. At sixty-one he retired to the town
of Hills, Minnesota, in Rock county, as his sister and her
husband had done ten years earlier. {11} There they lived
comfortable small-town existences until their deaths in 1925.

Abraham (1836ó1910), the older son of Jacob and Gro, the
one most expected to assist his parents, was the first to
leave the farm. Only two years after the family settled in
the Decorah area, when the boy was a mere sixteen years old,
he headed for Springfield, Illinois, where he entered the
so-called Illinois State University, a school founded and
maintained by Lutherans. He remained there for eight years,
supporting his studies by working as a custodian and librarian
in the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln was making his reputation
as a defense attorney. {12} Jacobsonís personal connections
with the future president were few, but he was a schoolmate
and friend of Lincolnís son, Robert. {13} The Springfield
period in the lives of both Abrahams ended in 1860, when Lincoln
became president and Jacobson left for Chicago to teach and
preach in the Augustana Synod. He was functioning in this
capacity at Augustana College when his brother Niels arrived
there in 1860. {14}

Abraham Jacobson, probably
around 1900.

Although Jacob Abrahamson, the father, chose to remain in
a vocation appropriate to someone of his status in Norway,
he allowed and possibly even encouraged his children to make
use of the opportunities in America of which he had written
so glowingly upon arrival. Their early departure from their
aging parents ó the mother was crippled with arthritis from
the late 1850s until her death in 1884 ó appears to have led
to no breach in family relations even though it was not in
keeping with rural Norwegian custom. {15}

A pull between the agrarian and the urban, the mundane and
the intellectual, existed in the Jacobson family well before
its arrival in America. Several generations back, the Jacobsons
were connected with the prominent Quisling family of pastors
that entered Norway from Denmark in the 1600s. The quality
of Jacobís letter from 1848 and the fact that the home at
Stenbole had apparently been a favorite one of the local schoolteacher
indicates that a certain regard for culture had been part
of the Jacobson family tradition. {16} This does not mean
that the family was exceptional among rural immigrants from
Norway. One finds the meeting of peasant and official strains
in many immigrant family histories.

Abraham is the figure in whom the cultural dynamics were
most apparent. He began to show inclinations toward the American,
the urban, and the intellectual soon after his arrival from
Norway at age twelve. During his first two years in America,
while the family was temporarily settled in Wisconsin, he
hired out to an American hotel- and store-keeper at Little
Muskego Lake. He was so well received that his employer, a
Mr. Taylor, gave him lessons in English, got him started in
an American school, and even wanted to adopt him. {17} The
adoption was resisted by both him and the family, but Abrahamís
experience with the Taylors undoubtedly prepared the way for
his remarkable move two years later when he entered Illinois
State University as the first Norwegian at that institution
and one of the first children of Norwegian immigrants to enter
any American institution of higher learning. {18}

Another indication of Abrahamís rapid Americanization was
his marriage in 1860 to Mary Hannah OíConnor. Little is known
about her because of her death the following year in Decorah,
but the name indicates that she was of Irish-American origin,
and a photograph suggests that she was a woman of culture
and sophistication.

Although Abraham had been in a primarily non-Norwegian environment
during his eight years in Springfield, he was ready to reestablish
connections with the Norwegian-American community and his
own background after the death of Mary. In 1861ó1862, he traveled
as a missionary to the Norwegians in the newly organized Dakota
Territory and to the Scandinavians in the ill-fated colony
at Gaspé near Quebec, Canada. In 1863 he remarried,
this time to a nineteen-year-old Norwegian-American girl,
Nikoline Hegg, from Lier, near Drammen, who lived with her
parents on a farm adjacent to that of his family. He actually
remained at home as a farmer for three years before heading
out again, this time for post-graduate study at Concordia
Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, where pastors
for the Norwegian Lutheran church in America were then being
trained. After another missionary journey, which took him
to west-central Minnesota, he accepted a call to the Norwegian
parish at Perry, Wisconsin, in 1869. {19}

While firmly rooted in a rural Norwegian immigrant community,
Abraham and his family developed at Perry a gracious style
of living, more in line with that of the old official class
in Norway than with that of the American farmer. This was
very evident to his daughter Clara, who begins her "minder
fra Perry prestegaard" with reference to Gustava Kiellandís
and Elise Aubertís stories of life in the old Norwegian parsonages.
{20} It was at Perry that the familyís interest in music revealed
itself in a material way when the pastor bought a small cabinet
organ for the parsonage even before there was an organ at
the church. Victorian furniture was purchased from a Norwegian
merchant, Gabrielsen, in Milwaukee, and other fine pieces
of furniture were made by a local carpenter from Valdres,
Aslak Lie. {21} Modern technology was also introduced. The
Jacobsons were among the first in the community to have a
sewing machine, and the pastor is credited with being the
first person to use one. In line with the ministers of the
enlightenment period in Norway, Jacobson assisted the parishioners
in practical as well as spiritual matters. He instructed others
in the use of sewing machines and helped keep their machines
in repair.

Abraham Jacobson with his family and
hired help as photographed in the yard of Perry parish
parsonage by Andrew Dahl about 1877.

Another indication of Jacobsonís ongoing fascination with
the new and the cosmopolitan while devoting most of his attention
to the rural Norwegian community at Perry was his trip with
his wife to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.
At that time he also visited New York and Washington, calling
on President Grant at the White House. His interest in expositions
was ongoing. Even after returning to farming he attended the
world expositions in Chicago, St. Louis, and Portland, possibly
a record in worldís fair attendance for a Norwegian American.
{22}

The parlor in Perry parsonage as photographed
about 1877 by Andrew Dahl.
All the newly obtained furniture and many of the accessories
seen here were taken back to Iowa in 1878 and are still
on the farm or with the family.

But the pendulum swung back to the farm. In the mid1870s,
Abraham Jacobson bought the home farm in Iowa, perhaps to
assist his parents financially and probably with the intent
of returning there. Exhausted from the ministry, he and his
wife and seven children left Perry in 1879 and settled again
in Iowa as the owners and operators of the farm he had left
as a sixteen-year-old boy twenty-seven years earlier. The
years of exposure to American ways had apparently not allowed
Abraham to forget the Norwegian tradition that gave the oldest
son responsibility for the family farm. Nature recognized
the fate that was directing Abraham as he turned from regular
involvement in the ministry to the agrarian life of his immediate
ancestors. While the wagons were loading to leave Perry parish,
a sudden cyclone swept over the area, removing the roof and
upper walls of the parsonage and demolishing the church. The
life of a visitor from the poor farm at Verona, Wisconsin,
stopping to say farewell to the Jacobsons was claimed by the
storm. "Asgårdsreien," the turbulent celestial
ride of exiled spirits from the pagan world, still hovered
over the Jacobsons even after leaving the deep valleys of
Telemark.

Abraham Jacobson with his wife, children,
mother (directly in front of him), and possibly his
mother-in-law photographed about 1883 at the old homestead
in Iowa. The pastor is here in the farmerís traditional
log chair rather than in the more urban captainís chair
of the Perry parish photo.

During the thirty-year regime of Abraham from 1879
to his death in 1910 that the Jacobson farmstead acquired
those characteristics that most clearly reflect the dynamics
at play in Norwegian immigrant life. He is to the second phase
of the farmsteadís history what his father had been to the
first. The original log house, in which the functions of kitchen,
dining room, and living room were all combined in the one
large space, was expanded immediately to include a frame-construction
parlor for the fine furniture brought from Wisconsin and,
several years later, a frame-construction summer kitchen.
The family was used to both at the parsonage in Perry. {23}
All additions to the basic log house ó the back lean- to,
the parlor, and the summer kitchen ó could originally be entered
only by going out of doors, a continuation of the early Norwegian
tradition of having various functional units of the farmstead
in separate buildings. These were soon linked by simple frame
structures which allowed internal communication between all
units, making it, in other words, an American house. By 1908,
the summer kitchen had been expanded to include a year-round
kitchen, a dining room, and two second floor bedrooms. The
farmstead had reached the full extent of its physical development
two years before Abrahamís death in 1910 {24}

When this photograph of three generations
was taken in 1912, the house had reached the full
extent of its development and convenient interior
connections had been established between all units
of the house except the second stories of the oldest
unit far back on the right and the latest unit to
the left. Charlotte, one of the donors of the farmstead
to Vesterheim, stands between her grandmother Nikoline
and her mother Minnie, who holds a new Abraham, born
shortly after his namesakeís death. The rider is Olaf
J., son of Isaac.

The pastor-farmer is here saying farewell
to his guests at the old farmstead around 1890. He walked
with a cane after a fall on board ship while on his
only trip to Norway, in 1888.

Unlike his father, Abraham was a gentleman farmer. His grandchildren
say that he did not do farm work, and photographs showing
him in his top hat by the buggy or writing at his desk help
to confirm this. {25} During his later life he served for
over fifteen years as president of the Norwegian Mutual Life
Insurance Company of Winneshiek county. {26} From 1903 to
1905 he was a member of the 31st General Assembly of Iowa.
{27} For a period he traveled as an overseer for the Mandt
wagon factory in Stoughton, Wisconsin. {28} He often served
as a substitute pastor in local congregations and even returned
to Perry parish in Wisconsin in 1890 to serve in this capacity.
{29} At this same time he was also involved in the church
controversy that led to the founding of the North Washington
Prairie Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church, a congregation
of the United Church to which he remained faithful until his
death. {30}

During the decade before his death
in 1910, Abraham Jacobson spent much of his time writing
historical articles and columns for his agricultural
series in Decorah Posten. He had previously cut a large
opening in the wall of the old log part of the house
and installed the bay window by which he is sitting.

In many ways, however, the move to Iowa did represent a serious
return to agrarian interests and Norwegian cultural roots.
One should not belittle Abrahamís ability as a farmer. Assessor
records show that the amount of livestock on the farm almost
tripled after his arrival in 1879, while the acreage remained
the same. He devoted much attention to rationalizing farm
methods and experimenting with new crops and technology. He
is credited with having introduced clover to Winneshiek county,
a possible reason for his naming the farm Cloverdale. For
fifteen years toward the end of his life he edited a column
in the Norwegian-language newspaper Decorah Posten entitled
"Farmen og haven" (Farm and Garden). {31} The probate
record at the time of Abrahamís death in 1910 includes a gas
engine. {32} Although his wife and children did most of the
work, an aspect of Norwegian tradition which Abraham never
abandoned, he must have been a good farm manager.

That the return also did mark a renewed interest in his past
is evidenced by Abrahamís trip to Norway in 1888, a trip on
which a fall led to permanent lameness. {33} He was among
the founders of the Norwegian Pioneer Association of Winneshiek
county, led the erecting of a monument to pioneer Norwegians
at the Washington Prairie Pioneer Cemetery in 1887, and did
considerable writing about his past and about local history
in general. {34} Visitors from Norway were welcome at the
Jacobson farm, one being the distinguished Hardanger violinist,
Knut Dahle, who appears with his violin in snapshots from
Cloverdale. {35}

It was possible for Abraham to keep the complex cultural
strains which were part of his background and nature in balance.
This was more difficult for the generations that followed
and the imbalance generally favored the urban and the intellectual.
A grandson of Abraham says that the children were oriented
toward college from the time they were young. {36} He was
probably speaking of his own generation, but it was undoubtedly
true of the one preceding it as well. When Abraham approached
his last days in 1910, the options for retaining the farm
in the family of eleven children were few. His oldest child,
Clara (1863ó1949), was a schoolteacher, a distinguished writer
of local history, and the family photographer. She never married.
{37} The next child, Mary (1865ó1954), had become a college
music teacher and in 1895 had married Professor I. F. Grose
of St. Olaf College. The oldest son, Jacob (1868ó1942), did
indeed live on a farm, but it was in the second center of
concentration for the family, Rock county, Minnesota. {38}
Signe (1870ó1961) was married to Rev. Knute E. Bakken. Isaac
(1872ó1925) was originally oriented toward a career in music
but was making his living as a sign painter in Minneapolis.
David (1875ó1955) was a graduate of the University of Minnesota
College of Pharmacy who was practicing his profession in Minneapolis.
Helga (1877ó1948) was a college teacher of English who in
1909 had married Lars W. Boe, later president of St. Olaf
College. Otto (1879ó1959) was farming in North Dakota but
was more inclined toward public service. He had attended St.
Olaf College and held the position of Registrar of Deeds in
Adams county, North Dakota, where he lived. He was soon to
enter Luther Seminary and be ordained as a pastor. Christianna
(1884ó1948), a graduate of St. Olaf College, was teaching
English in high school and was still single. Ragnvald (1888ó1949)
was attending Waldorf College and could not originally have
been interested in farming because he joined the United States
Navy and served through World War I. He eventually did settle
on a farm in Glenwood township near Decorah. The lot fell
to Carl (1881ó1949), who had attended Valders College in Decorah
and was, according to his family, as interested in intellectual
and cultural pursuits as in agriculture. The old sense of
obligation to the family and its property, a lingering heritage
from Norway, was probably what determined his fate as it had
previously determined his fatherís.

Clara Jacobson, perhaps on a visit
home from teaching around 1890, is dressed in urban
high fashion. Since she had already begun photography
at this time, the camera being used is probably hers.

Abraham Jacobson and his wife Nikoline
are surrounded in this photograph from about 1890 by
all eleven children. Carl, the little boy in the lower
right, was destined to assume responsibility for the
farm through another generation. It may be Claraís camera
that is again at work for this photograph. The intention
has been to create the ambiance of a studio picture,
but the piece of furniture to the right and the uneven
light indicate that the photograph must have been made
at home. The exaggerated twists and angles of bodies
and heads are probably an attempt to create a professional
look that becomes almost a caricature. A meeting of
the traditional and the modern is revealed by the fact
that the four oldest girls are wearing brooches of the
rural Norwegian folk type on dresses in the latest American
fashion.

With his mother remaining for fourteen years as owner of
the farm and the guardian of her husbandís tradition and with
his own skepticism about agricultural innovation, Carl retained
the status quo on Cloverdale to a remarkable degree. It is
popularly said that nothing stands still, everything goes
backward or ahead. This was not true at the Jacobson farm.
Nothing went into decay, nor was anything substantial added.
The practices of Abraham were adequately sound and up-to-date
to carry the farm for three decades, but the prospects for
its future became increasingly uncertain.

The interest in the intellectual, the urban, and the cosmopolitan
must have been as strong in Carl as it was in his father.
While a tractor was not used on the farm until the 1940s,
the house had a radio in 1927. Both Carl and his wife, Minnie
Moen Jacobson, were fond of classical music, and the family
would gather around the radio on Saturday afternoons to listen
to the Metropolitan Opera. {39} Minnieís brother, Carl Moen,
who was to live on the farm after no direct descendants were
available to operate it, recalls that there were radios on
both the first floor and the second. Reading was also a favorite
pastime of the family, certainly of the father. {40}

All of Carlís six children attended college. Three held teaching
or service positions in educational institutions. One became
a scientist at the Dupont Laboratories in Wilmington, Delaware.
Vincent, who had attended St. Olaf College and spent some
time in the Navy, was the member left with the responsibility
for the farm after Carlís death. Because of personal conflicts,
which may or may not have been related to those discussed
above, Vincent made his exit from this life on September 30,
1954, {41} as had his brother Abraham fifteen years before
him.

The agrarian strain in the Jacobson line was coming to an
end. Paternal devotion and lingering regard for the farm led
the now urban owners to retain the homestead while the land
was rented out. The one direct descendant in whom the duality
of his father and grandfather remained most marked was Eugene,
who assisted with the operation of the farm while holding
a position at St. Olaf College. When illness interfered with
Eugeneís involvement in the late 1970s the time had come for
the Jacobsonsí ancient connection with the land to be severed.
They had experienced what Jacob had foreseen in 1848 when
he told his father in a letter that one could live better
in America without a farm than in Norway with one of the biggest.

By 1940 the bay window, which half
a century earlier was cut through the log wall of the
original house, formed the backdrop for the latest and
finest radio-phonograph. Constance, another of the donors
of the farmstead, is looking at an album of Richard
Straussís "Till Eulenspiegelís Merry Pranks."
The old and the new, the rural and the urban, are here
still in harmony, but the scale is weighted in favor
of the new and urban.

The fact that an intellectual strain in the Jacobson family
ran parallel with an agrarian strain had at times created
a precarious situation for the farm. Ultimately it was this
intellectual strain that led to its preservation. Without
it, the family would scarcely have donated the farmstead to
be maintained as an example of the agrarian base on which
it and much in Norwegian-American culture rest. This strain
also contributed to the importance of the farmstead as a visual
record of immigrant life. In addition, there is an extensive
collection of letters from many members of the family, historical
writings from Abraham and Clara, and photographs from Clara
and Eugene. {42} The family not only had the ability and made
the effort to produce these things, but it had the foresight
to preserve them.

The farmstead stands as an accumulative material record of
a family caught in the dynamic interplay between inherited
conceptions and the budding aspirations nourished by the possibilities
in the New World. On the framework of a traditional Norwegian
farmstead transplanted to America and still actually including
objects brought from Norway or made here according to Norwegian
tradition, one finds the addition to the house of a parlor
and a bay window, both apparently from the 1880s; a nook for
a grand piano (now lost) from only a short time later; a painting
by Herbjørn Gausta obtained in 1883; {43} fine American
Victorian furniture of urban production purchased around 1870;
a bookcase with classic literature and major reference works;
and a knickknack shelf with mementos of travels to most parts
of the United States, to Canada, and to northern Europe. The
dynamics ended when the new elements which put strain on the
old structure drew the actors off this stage to a more completely
American existence in urban scenes. But the stage remains
as a set against which the drama of immigrant life can be
better understood than without its visual props.

<2> Illustration is assumed to be a photograph ordered
by Abraham Jacobson, Decorah, from Knut Dahle, Vestfjorddalen,
Norway, and referred to by him in a return letter dated October
8, 1898, in Vesterheim Archives.

<5> The fig. 4 referred to in note 4 shows a building
of this type which appears to be of some age.

<6> According to family tradition as presented in an
interview conducted by Steven Johnson with Henning Jacobson,
in Vesterheim Archives, the house was originally one story
and was later raised to its present height. If this was the
case, the old one-story house with its roof may have become
the upper story. Not including the dividing wall in the new
lower story would have simplified the raising process and
given more flexibility to the utilization of space. The problem
with this theory is that no evidence of two stages in production
can be found on the building itself.

<7> The lack of close fitting between logs in immigrant
building has been explained in several ways. One is that the
early houses were looked on as temporary and therefore constructed
with a minimum of work. The other is that the irregular shapes
of the logs made close fitting difficult. The immigrant type
is standard for most American log building. See Reidar Bakken,
"En solungs amerikanske hus, tilpasninger til kultur-
og naturmiljø," in Nytt om gammalt, Yearbook
of the Glomdal Museum (Elverum, 1986), 75,

<12> Typed obituary of Abraham Jacobson, possibly from
the Annals of Iowa, in the file of his brother Niels Jacobson,
in NAHA Archives. Also Abraham Jacobson, "Personal Reminiscences
of Abraham Lincoln," an unidentified clipping in NAHA
Archives.

<18> O. M. Norlie, History of the Norwegian People
in America (Minneapolis, 1925), 217.

<19> Abraham Jacobson obituary. Most of the above biographical
information is from this source.

<20> Symra (Decorah, 1912), 12. These memoirs
were published in English translation in Norwegian-American
Studies and Records, 14 (1944), 139ó158. The information
about life at Perry which follows is from this article and
the far more detailed account titled "Childhood Memories"
still in manuscript at NAHA.

<21> Clara Jacobson does not mention Aslak Lieís name,
but the identification has been well established by the research
of John O. Holzhueter of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Without referring to the Jacobson furniture, Holzhueter writes
about Lie in "Aslak Lie and the Challenge of the Artifact,"
in Wisconsin Magazine of History, 70 (Autumn, 1986),
3ó20.

<22> Abraham Jacobson obituary. This is the only source
for the visit to Portland. Jacobsonís descendants were not
aware of the trip.

<23> The most complete description of the parlor is
in Clara Jacobsonís manuscript "Childhood Memories,"
66b.

<24> The chronology of physical changes on the farmstead
has been arrived at by checking information from early letters
and interviews with family members against evidence on the
site itself.

<30> The original Articles of Incorporation of the
church dated December 8, 1890, with Abraham Jacobsonís signature
as secretary, were found in papers on the farmstead and are
now at Vesterheim. A letter from Elizabeth Koren, daughter
of Reverend U. V. Koren, to Mary Jacobson, daughter of Abraham,
August 3, 1889, in Vesterheim Archives, deals touchingly with
the personal consequences of the controversy.

<31> O. M. Norlie, Norsk lutherske prester i Amerika,
1843ó1913 (Minneapolis, 1915), 106. In English the column
is referred to as "Practical Farming."

<32> The records were with material preserved on the
farm and are now at Vesterheim.

<34> Abraham Jacobson obituary; Decorah Posten,
August 30, 1887. Among historical writings by Abraham Jacobson
is the essay on the Norwegian settlement of Winneshiek county,
Iowa, which appeared in slightly different versions in Standard
Historical Atlas, in Decorah Public Opinion, August
25, 1909, and in Norwegian in Hjalmar Holand, De norske
settlementers historie (Ephraim, Wisconsin, 1909). Others
are "Personal Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln,"
known only through an unidentified newspaper clipping at NAHA,
and "A Pioneer Pastorís Journey to Dakota in 1861,"
in Norwegian-American Studies and Records, 6 (1931),
53ó65.

<35> In the collection of Charlotte and Constance Jacobson.
Dahle appears to have lived at Stenbøle, since Abraham
wrote to him for photographs of it in 1898. Those that arrived
have Knut and other members of his family in them.

<41> The Decorah Journal, September 30, 1954,
and Decorah Public Opinion, October 4, 1954.

<42> Important historical works by Clara not referred
to earlier are "A Journey to America in the Fifties,"
in Norwegian-American Studies and Records, 12 (1941),
60ó78, and "Memories from Motherís Childhood in Norway
and from the Pioneer Days in America," published in Norwegian
in Reform (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), but known to the
authors through a typewritten translation in the archives
of NAHA.

<43> This Norwegian-American artist also came from
Vestfjorddalen, but there is no indication of early contact
between the families. This seems to have come through the
Korens, but it continued to the artistís death. "Malla"
Jacobson, Decorah, to Clara Jacobson, Beaver Creek, Minnesota,
March 8, 1883, and Isaac Jacobson, Minneapolis, to Clara Jacobson,
Decorah, January 12, 1920, and December 31, 1921, in Vesterheim
Archives.